Fairmont Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in
HamburgReview photos and history of
the luxury hotel
Article added on March 3, 2012 at 00:10 German time

There are only two true
“Four Seasons” in the world, the one in Munich (German
article) and the one in Hamburg.
The historic landmark Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg has become a Fairmont
Hotel in 2007. It went through a €25 million renovation from January 2008 to
September 2010 in which for instance over 250 antiques were restored.
Highlights include the suites named after Maria Callas, Prince Heinrich,
Thomas Mann and
Sir Peter Ustinov (German article) as well as the Presidential Suite
with its 260 m².

Before 2012, I have stayed at the Hanseatic hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in 2004 and
2007. My last arrival on February 24, 2007 coincided exactly with the 110th
year of its opening. I stayed in room 312, a junior suite with an
Inner Alster Lake (Binnenalster) view. If you have the choice, always
go for the lake view. That's what I did again in 2012. The nine
Deluxe Double Rooms with balconies on the fifth floor offer the best
price-performance-ratio.

Friedrich Haerlin, the founder of the Vier Jahreszeiten

Friedrich Haerlin (1857-1941), a native Swabian born in Gaisburg near
Stuttgart, was the youngest of four children of the local master baker, who
also run an inn, a farm and a haulage business. Because of an allergy, the
boy could not take over the bakery. Even worse, his father had to declare
bankruptcy in the 1873-crisis. Three years later, the 17-year old son
decided to try his fortune abroad. He took the train from Stuttgart to
Geneva (German
article) and landed a job at the railway station
restaurant in the Swiss city. He worked hard and learned French. Therefore,
a fellow German offered him a job in his elegant café-restaurant. After a
few other jobs, for instance in a hotel in Menton on the Côte d'Azur, he
went to a Southampton hotel to learn English. After a year, thanks to his
brother, an architect, Friedrich Haerlin landed a job as a waiter at the
famous Zurich hotel Baur au Lac, founded by the Austrian Johann Baur in
1844. The hotel director at the Baur au Lac took the Swabian waiter with him
to Cannes, where he spent the winter season.

In 1882, Friedrich Haerlin was offered an opportunity that changed his life,
the book-keeping job at the best address in Bern, Hotel Bellevue, situated
next to the Swiss Parliament. As early as in autumn 1883, after the death of
her husband, Philippine Oswald made Friedrich Haerlin director of Hotel
Bellevue and doubled his salary. The Swabian was very successful and offered
a part of the profit. He even wrote special clauses into his contract for
the case that he would get married or that the sons of the hotel owner's widow would
take over the hotel.

In 1891 Friedrich Haerlin met his future wife Thekla Toussaint from Bremen,
the daughter of a successful hatter and herself the best gymnast and swimmer
in her sports club. They married in 1893 and took over the management of Hotel
Bellevue in Thun. When the ownership changed and he disagreed with the new
business strategy, he quit and sold his part of the hotel stocks.

Birth of a legend

On February 1897, on his 40th birthday, Friedrich Haerlin purchased a small
hotel in Hamburg with 12 rooms and a restaurant for 420,100 mark, inspired by the Swabian saying: “At 40 you'll get clever”.

The hotel's address, Jungfernstieg, can be translated as “virgins
promenade”. It was where the wealthy families would walk their unmarried daughters in search for a good match.

Friedrich Haerlin invested 100,000 mark in his new hotel and, the same year, his wife gave
birth to their fourth child, Fritz, who would later take over the Vier
Jahreszeiten. Because Friedrich saw no chance to buy the next door building
to enlarge his small hotel, he even thought about selling it and moving to
Switzerland. Only because he got no offers, he decided to stay in Hamburg.

Friedrich Haerlin put a lot of emphasis on the service in his hotel, which
quickly attracted celebrities such as the composer and pianist Eugen
d'Albert. When the next door physician moved to a posh suburb, Friedrich
Haerlin first managed to rent parts of the man's house and, in 1903,
convinced the physician to sell it to him. One by one, the hotelier bought
all neighboring houses and turned them into one luxury hotel. In 1905, he
changed the name to Grandhotel Vier Jahreszeiten, which already featured 57
rooms. In 1911, it had been enlarged to 140 living and bedrooms with 50
bathrooms and telephone lines to all rooms. By 1934, today's size was
reached. No additional buildings have been bought since then. The present-day hotel features 156 rooms and suites, several restaurants, private rooms,
a large gym and more.

The rich and famous continued to stay in Haerlin's hotel.
When the wealthy ship owner Albert
Ballin had his palace-like Villa am Rothenbaum built, he stayed with his
wife and child at the Vier Jahreszeiten all through the autumn and winter of 1908/09.

The wars

After economically tough times during the First World War, when the military
had occupied the hotel, Friedrich Haerlin renovated the Vier Jahreszeiten with
the help of his wife Thekla and his son Fritz. They opened Restaurant
Haerlin, which quickly became Hamburg's first culinary address. During the
great inflation in the 1920s, Friedrich managed to buy 35,000 bottles of the
best German and French wines with the soon worthless paper money.

In the 1920s, his son Fritz worked in hotels in Scandinavia, Switzerland and
Madrid's Ritz
Carlton. The leading hotel trade newspaper, the New York Hotel Review,
was impressed by the fact that Fritz began his career in
New York City's hotel Astor, which later became the Waldorf Astoria, as
a simple waiter, although, as the heir to a famous hotelier, he could have
gotten a much better job.

In 1932 Fritz Haerlin took over the hotel from his father. He was a man of
contradictions. He joined the infamous SS in 1933 and became a Nazi party
member in 1937. At the same time, the Vier Jahreszeiten remained an Island
of the Blissful from 1933 to 1945, where no Nazi propaganda and meetings
took place. He hosted Jews and tried but did not manage to have his Jewish
concierge flee the country because of a Gestapo intervention; the poor man
died in a concentration camp. More details can be found in the German
article Das
Vier Jahreszeiten von 1933 bis 1945.

Friedrich Haerlin died in 1942, his wife the following year. Fritz was the
only one of three sons who survived the war. He married Agnes Annemarie
Knoops in 1942. She had worked as an intern at the hotel. Their daughter
Thekla Clara was born the following year. Their second daughter Annemarie
was born in 1944.

From WWII to the present

On May 3, 1945 the Vier Jahreszeiten became the British headquarters. The
officers quickly found the hidden wine bottles, cognacs and silverware. Before he got his hotel back,
Fritz Haerlin ran a restaurant in Hamburg. A Belgian friend working for him
managed to get a job at the British headquarters and, together with others,
they managed to smuggle out of the occupied hotel silverware, porcelain,
rugs, antiquities and more.

Friedrich Haerlin had most of the furniture and other objects stamped with a hotel sign. Therefore, Fritz managed to get
a lot of the family properties back. Even a general was forced to give back
expensive bedroom furniture. Therefore, many antiques as well as 16th and 17th
century Flemish tapestries collected by the Haerlin family are still
displayed all over the Fairmont Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten today.

With the little money he made from the small rent paid by the British occupiers, Fritz Haerlin prepared himself for the day he would get his hotel back. This day
came on January 30, 1952. On April 3 already, he re-opened the Vier
Jahreszeiten.

Among the famous guests who stayed at the hotel since then, let's just
mention the legendary ship owner Aristotelis Onassis. One late evening, the
regular guest saw the concierge, who could not hide it in time, eat a butter
bread. The hungry billionaire asked what it was and then asked for a bite.
The Greek was enthusiastic and henceforth, the concierge and the billionaire
would share simple butter breads at night.

The Vier Jahreszeiten was also the place where the love affair between
Aristotelis Onassis and the celebrated soprano Maria Callas partly unfolded,
especially in 1959 and 1962.

In 1966 the Vier Jahreszeiten joined The Leading Hotels of the World.
Unfortunately, Fritz Haerlin was not as business-savvy as his father. The
downfall accelerated for a while after Fritz Haerlin's death in 1975. His widow, Agnes,
wanted to see the world. Her daughters were not happy with their mother's
spending habits. Worse, mother Agnes fired many of the leading staff and rehired
some of them afterwards at higher salaries.

Luckily, in 1968, Fritz Haerlin had hired Gert Prantner (*1940) from the
Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich. He had studied at Cornell University in Ithaca.
Prantner was one of those who had been fired and re-hired. He convinced Agnes Haerlin
to reinvest in the hotel. He modernized the budget planning, marketing and
introduced computers. From 1975 to 1989, Pratner tripled the hotel's
turnover.

On March 1, 1983 Agnes Haerlin did not only celebrate her mother's birthday,
but the tax fraud office searched Agnes' villa too and found a secret Swiss bank
account with two million mark. The lady fled to Salzburg, because Austria
does (or at least did) not extradite tax evaders. In 1987, a court ordered
her to pay 2,4 million mark plus an additional 1,1 million mark. She stayed
in Austria. When her daughters got the news by phone of her death in
Salzburg in 1992, Gert Prantner heard daughter Thekla exclaim: “Anne, mother
just died. Champagne!”

In December 1989, the Japanese Hiroyoshi Aoki offered 215
million mark for the Vier Jahreszeiten. The previous year, he had bought the
Westin chain with 80 hotels. On December 27, 1989 the 92-year era of the
Haerlin family at the Vier Jahreszeiten came to an end.

After the 1990-Gulf War, the Aoki team tried to save as much money in the
hotel as they could. Gert Prantner left the hotel in 1993. The service
culture was lost. The turnover shrank from 35 to 24 million mark. The hotel
lost a lot of its standing.

In 1997, the Raffles Group took over the hotel and appointed Ingo C. Peters
as its new director. In 1982, Peters had started his career in the Hamburg hotel
as the bellboy before studying at Cornell University in New York and leading
the Phuket Yacht Club in Thailand, the Mandarin Oriental in Jakarta as well
as several Ritz Carlton hotels.

Renamed the Fairmont
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten on April 30, 2007 the luxury hotel in Hamburg distinguishes itself by
its tradition,
continuity and subtle innovations - I appreciated the Loewe flat screen HDTV
in my room. Above all, the hotel has always
impressed me with its excellent staff. People make a difference!

In 2012, Ingo C. Peters is still the hotel's director. He made it again one of the best
in Germany by avoiding pomp and keeping the hotel philosophy simple:
“service, service, service.”

If you read German, check our series of seven articles about the hotel from 2004, starting
with the one about
Friedrich Haerlin, which offer plenty of additional details. The main source
for this article is the German book by Sepp Ebelseder and Michael Seufert: Vier Jahreszeiten. Hinter den
Kulissen eines Luxushotels. Die Hanse, Hamburg, 2002, 460 pages. Order it
from Amazon.de.
Order the first edition of the book, Rowohlt, 1999, from
Amazon.de.
Purchase books about Hamburg from
Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk
and
Amazon.de.